What are you making?

[Yakoob]

Haha thanks! but I'm not going into full terrain deforming mode. I experiment with the idea of making snow mounds but... it wasn't really fun? Since you're not part of the physical world it doesn't really serve a generalizible purpose (like, say, the Gloo Gun in Prey that lets you climb around). I guess you can block off hoomans but that's not really useful given the objectives in most lives. Sure, we can make a whole level about creating barriers and blocking off hoomans, but then the ability is just sort of one-trick-pony.

I want the snow to be a permanently unlockable ability, meaning it has to be useful/interesting in all levels (just like the thunder which scares hoomans away and sets things on fire, or tornado, which can pick up any physics object and throw it around). So in the end, I figured making everything slide around and soaking hoomans + turning them into little snowballs was the best use of the snow ability.

Even if it's not practical in every level, it's always funny to make hoomans face-palm into the snow and watch them roll around as little snowballs screaming in eternal pain that is existential dread of life

[Weasel]

It's hard to show off a VR game that has very placeholdery graphics and where most of the work I've been putting in is for the way it feels to play, especially when I I'm not sure if I want to spoil one of the biggest features!

I am still working on my VR game, though, taking longer than expected to get a demo ready because I keep thinking of little things that I can improve before sharing it. I might be getting pretty close, though.

Recently, I added things to make it work (reasonably well) if the player is sitting down. That's slightly more complicated than it sounds, because the entire game gets scaled based on how tall the player is in real life, so that every player will (theoretically) be able to reach or not reach the same ledges (for example). If a sitting player was treated as being short, they would be scaled up and have very long arms!

Then, I spent a lot of time working on a system that attempts to predict which way the player's body is facing, so that it can use a forward direction for the body that isn't just the direction the head is facing. It took longer than it should have because I didn't realize (or forgot) that Unity uses a left-handed coordinate system, making vector cross products point the opposite direction than you might expect.

Then I saw an interesting video that breaks down how Valve handles real-world movement in Half-Life: Alyx and decided to implement something similar. The main idea is: you have to allow the player to walk wherever their real legs take them, because making that stop when they hit a virtual wall can make them sick. So, allow that, but only until they use artificial locomotion again. If they walked to somewhere they shouldn't be, teleport them back to their last legal position and continue their artificial movement from there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPrfC7r2c78

Here's another teaser image, even though it doesn't show a lot. To give a sense of scale, the squares in the placeholder texture on that building are 1 meter each, and the player character is about 2 meters tall:

[Yakoob]

Ah VR... I never quite got into that. TBH, one of the reasons holding me back from making VR stuff is that... well, I can't even make a regular game successful, so why would I add an extra layer of challenge

Meanwhile, in Cloud-land, I just put up the free demo on Itch and GameJolt and it seems to be getting some good attention!

On the development side - you can now rain bread.

[Anarchic Fox]

Looks like a fun time, Yakoob! With Goat Simulator, Untitled Goose Game and now this, it looks like "chaos games," for lack of a better term, could become a genre of their own. Sandbox games where the joy lies in wreaking havok upon the sandbox.

[Yakoob]

I've spent the past 3 days looking at a ton of profiling screens while porting the game to the Switch.

Question of the day - why does the floor keep me from running smooth 60fps?



You think it's some weird glitch, or maybe a frame cap?

No.

That floor literally takes half of my GPU time.

fuck's sake....

[Weasel]

This may be a long shot, but it just so happened that I had a section of floor (just a coincidence) killing the frame rate in my VR project, and I eventually realized I had duplicate objects. I guess none of them were being culled because they were at the same camera depth, and I wasn't able to see z-fighting or anything because they were identical. Overdraw is a real frame rate killer on the Oculus Quest, not sure about the Switch.

[henke]

New Stilt Fella levels, babyyyyyyy!

[Thirith]

Love the ball pit at the end of the clip!

[Renzatic]

The only thing that could make Stilt Fella more awesome than it already is would be a rockin' theme song.

[henke]

Come on, what's wrong with the themesong it has? I paid 100 bucks for this thing ya know! Tho you can only hear it in the trailer and at the end of the game. There's a very stripped-down version playing in the menu.

[Thirith]

I’ve said so before - big Shirley Basseyish Bond-style number!

Stilt Fella,
He’s the man, the man with the stilts of gold!
Or so I’m told...

[Renzatic]

That's a fine track, great for driving background music that inspires players to greater heights of stiltness, but it's not a theme song.

Thirith's suggestion is about spot on, though I'd go more upbeat. Something like History Repeating by Propellerheads, but with stilt-centric lyrics would be perfect.

[Thirith]

There are so many to choose from:
Nobody Stilts It Better
For Your Stilts Only
You Know My Stilts
Guy Fall

[Renzatic]

Since I've picked up some extra skills over the year since I posted this, I decided to return to this set of tutorials I first started learning Substance Painter with.

My first go was this:


...I was so proud of that pig.

And this is what I've done over the last 5 days.


I figured it'd be a good way to learn UE4 too, since I want to use it for scene creation and rendering.

[Renzatic]

Still not finished, but hey, it's my first real render.

[henke]

Gorgeous! Very atmospheric.

[Renzatic]

And It Is Done.

[Sulphur]

I was expecting that to be some sort of metaphor for permabanning everyone, but I guess what you posted instead was excellent anyway.

[Renzatic]

That's coming later.

[Nameless Voice]

Makes me think of one of those classic point-and-click adventure games, with the really detailed hand-drawn background art.

[Renzatic]

I've decided to remake this old gas station I did years and years ago to see how much better I can do it.

I'm off to a good start. Got the ice box, and gas pump!

[Nameless Voice]

That looks... cool.

[Renzatic]

Aw, jeah!

[Yakoob]

i'm digging the pattern texture, feels almost paper-y/cardboard-y

[zombe]

I thought thous were shadowing artifacts. Anyway, looks super Fallouty in a good sense.